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foodBYTES http://beckyandthebeanstock.com/

A
new year and new beginnings. It's the best time to celebrate the lessons from the past. Which is why this blogger eats beans.

“How many beans can you name? If you're bean-literate, you might be familiar with 12 or so. Astonishingly, there are about 4,000 different varieties of what we loosely call “bean” that are cultivated in the U.S. alone. But many of these are barely surviving, maintained by a small group of preservationists and home gardeners who have fallen in love with the possibilities.

Diversity is nature's wild card. Prehistoric people consumed close to 1,500 wild plants and cultivated about 500 of them. Today, we depend on about 30 plants for 95 per cent of our food needs.

This puts our food supply at risk, and places many plants in extinction's path. .”

Hence her plan. “I'm going to eat my way through a year's worth of heirloom beans... I'll track down, obtain, and cook with a different variety of bean This will be a true celebration of the beauty and diversity of one small part of the foods available to us today...

My hope is that this will help reintroduce these beans into the food chain. That is, I hope you will go out and look for these beans, buy them, grow them, steal them (but not from me), talk about them, and above all, celebrate them and give them a permanent place on your table.”